Digital infrastructure is no longer just an industry; it is strategic power. Search engines shape access to knowledge. Cloud platforms host government data. Operating systems underpin public services. When those layers are controlled abroad, so is a slice of Europe's economic and political autonomy.
With 1.5 billion euros per week in VAT revenue at stake, there are now serious concerns about digital sovereignty. If that revenue of €1.5B a week disappears, the state will have to quickly borrow more on the international capital market. In theory, America could stop this process in the Netherlands thanks to a new tender.
If you have all the information you need at hand, it should take you 10 to 15 minutes to complete the survey. This new web-based, self-service survey walks organizations through 21 multiple-choice questions. Areas covered include data residency, encryption key control, disaster recovery planning for geopolitical events, and the ability to prevent sensitive data from crossing borders. The goal is to move digital sovereignty from vague policy talk to a measurable "sovereignty baseline" that IT and business leaders can act on.
They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or hire a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer function, because Europe has still not developed its own EU-wide payments system, so most electronic purchases go through Visa and Mastercard. Converting euros to foreign currencies is extraordinarily difficult because everything passes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life.
There was and is method to it. Type approval means that the device won't kill you, won't jam your airwaves, won't burst into flames, and other desirable negatives. If a business buys approved equipment, it won't invalidate its insurance, and many other legal protections and permissions flow. When the system stops working, which it does when individual consumers can buy cheap stuff directly from overseas, fiery death can follow.
You may have noticed that many European Union (EU) governments and agencies, worried about ceding control to untrustworthy US companies, have been embracing digital sovereignty. Those bodies are turning to running their own cloud and services instead of relying on, say, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. If you prize your privacy and want to control your own services, you can take that approach as well.
They called out about half a dozen particular instances of what they considered to be bullshit technology. We were too busy laughing sympathetically to whip out a laptop to make notes, but as best as we can recall the sequence, they were: Containers Kubernetes The "Cloud" Anything at all "as a Service" The Blockchain - anything, everything, based on it And now, arguably the biggest and worst of all, "generative AI"
This week's practical must-reads from The Local feature advice on what to do if you live in an area under a flood warning, the latest snow news for winter sports lovers, an update on France's Budget now that we have one, and why the Île de Ré is so expensive. This week, the French Riviera and parts of western France have been under high alert for flooding. It is the leading natural disaster affecting France and can lead to fatalities. Here's the crucial advice to follow if you are caught in a flood where you live.
Against that backdrop, Europe's reliance on American-made AI begins to look more and more like a liability. In a worst case scenario, though experts consider the possibility remote, the US could choose to withhold access to AI services and crucial digital infrastructure. More plausibly, the Trump administration could use Europe's dependence as leverage as the two sides continue to iron out a trade deal. "That dependency is a liability in any negotiation-and we are going to be negotiating increasingly with the US," says Taddeo.
According to Li Mandri, ING's centralised approach to AI development has resulted in a high success rate for pilot projects, with 90% moving to production compared to the industry average of 30. The bank has standardised on cloud-hosted AI models from preferred partners, which are then made available globally, allowing ING to scale. He says the platform is centrally managed with risk controls, guardrails and real-time monitoring.
Digital sovereignty has outgrown its niche as an IT concern and is now firmly on the boardroom agenda. This has been fueled in no small part by geopolitical concerns. However, while geopolitics may have pushed it into the spotlight, at its core digital sovereignty is about one thing: keeping the business running no matter what happens. When critical systems fail, there is always a cost.
Without a fundamental shift in how newsrooms think about and build technology, journalism's independence is in jeopardy. The threats are not abstract. Link referrals to newsroom websites are declining from both search engines and social media sites because tech companies want to keep users engaged in their own platforms. Information held in the cloud can be subpoenaed, often in secret, putting sources and journalists at risk.
Europe's long-running struggle to define digital sovereignty - and to turn it into something practical - is reaching an inflection point. That was the message at this year's Gaia-X Summit in Porto, where executives and governments argued that the continent finally has the technical foundations for sovereign data sharing. All it needs now is the political will, economic models, and global partnerships to make it work at scale.
The Dutch government will investigate the consequences of the American IT company Kyndryl's takeover of the Dutch cloud service provider Solvinity. The company plays an essential role in the national identity system DigiD. Solvinity believes that the collaboration with Kyndryl will offer more opportunities to continue innovating in IT management, security, and automation. "We are aware of the questions that are circulating in the market," said CEO Daniëlle Schuur earlier this month.
A survey of CIOs and tech leaders in Western Europe has found 61 percent want to increase their use of local cloud providers amid global geopolitical uncertainty. Around half (53 percent) said geopolitics would restrict their use of global providers in the future. Gartner surveyed 241 CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe between May and July. It found that ongoing geopolitical tension was fueling concerns over digital sovereignty.
Lots of companies are announcing AI this and AI that, but few of them offer more than new AI lipstick on an old pig when you look at them closely. Then, there's what SUSE is doing with its release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 (SLES 16), available today. This new version is positioned as an AI-ready operating system tailored to the demands of today's hybrid cloud, data center, and edge computing environments.
Cyber Security Festival 2025, one of the regions premier cybersecurity event, is set to bring together over 1,200 IT professionals, experts, and thought leaders - including David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of 37signals, and New York Times-bestselling author. Two days of discussions, hands-on workshops, and networking await participants. Taking place on November 4-5, 2025, at TAP1 in Copenhagen, the festival will tackle the most pressing challenges in cybersecurity, from AI-driven threats to geopolitical cyber warfare.
Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers.
German Minister for Digital Affairs Karsten Wildberger emphasizes that Europe's call for digital sovereignty should not be confused with protectionism. According to him, Europe must develop its own digital infrastructure. This is to reduce dependence on American technology companies. That does not mean that cooperation with the United States should be ruled out. In an interview with Reuters, Wildberger explains that Germany and the European Union can no longer be mere spectators or customers in the digital sector, but must play an active role themselves.
The European Commission is investing €1 billion in artificial intelligence. Its aim is to reduce dependence on American and Chinese technology. This Apply AI strategy focuses on ten crucial sectors, from healthcare to defense. The European Commission's new Apply AI strategy builds on an action plan published in April this year, writes Reuters. The goal is clear: Europe wants to become less dependent on foreign technology.
Nextcloud, a German productivity and collaboration software vendor, hopes to capitalize on the shift in mood. Working with Ionos, a German data center hosting company, Nextcloud plans to launch an open-source service that it bills as a digitally sovereign competitor to better-known US software-as-a-service (SaaS) products like Microsoft 365 (M365). Nextcloud, which launched in 2016, already develops and sells a suite of collaboration and productivity tools called Nextcloud Hub, which includes apps for document editing, email, and video meetings.
Given that corporate IT relies heavily on cloud-based infrastructure and services delivered via the public cloud, access to the data held in the cloud is paramount. Should all mission-critical data be held on-premise? What roles should digital sovereignty and digital residency play in a corporate IT strategy? These are among the questions being discussed at Forrester's forthcoming Technology & Innovation Summit in London.
